Exclusionary rule

SIGNIFICANCE: The exclusionary rule provides incentive for law-enforcement officers to honor citizens’ civil liberties and helps deter police misconduct.

In a 1914 case titled Weeks v. United States , the US Supreme Court created a rule of evidence, designed to deter overzealous federal police officers from violating citizens’ rights. The Court refused to permit prosecutors to use unlawfully obtained evidence at trial, even if that evidence was relevant to the matter at hand. This became known as the “exclusionary rule.”

The rule generally applies only in criminal trials, not in most civil trials. Although the rule requires the exclusion of evidence obtained by police misconduct, evidence obtained as the result of the independent actions of private citizens is generally admissible, even if the citizen has acted in violation of the law.

Changing Court Interpretations

At the time of its creation, this judicial construction was lauded by civil liberties advocates as an important step to deter police misconduct. Law-enforcement supporters warned that the exclusion of important but unlawfully obtained evidence would permit otherwise guilty defendants to go free. The rule was of limited effect, however, because it applied only to criminal cases tried in federal courts. It did not apply to criminal cases tried in state courts.

After 1914, various state supreme courts considered employing the exclusionary rule in their own jurisdictions. Some rejected the rule outright; they agreed with Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo, who complained that “the criminal goes free because the constable has blundered.” Other state supreme courts embraced the rule and mandated its application in their states.

By 1949, sixteen states had adopted the exclusionary rule; thirty-one states had rejected it. In that year, the US Supreme Court was asked to consider a case titled Wolf v. Colorado and the issue of whether the exclusionary rule should be mandated in all state courts. The defendant in that case argued that all states were bound to provide criminal defendants with due process, or “fundamental fairness,” under the Fourteenth Amendment. He reasoned that the admission of unlawfully obtained evidence in state criminal trials was fundamentally unfair. Justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the majority, declared that the exclusionary rule was not essential to the notion of due process and refused to mandate it in state prosecutions. The Court reasoned that states should be free to determine for themselves the best way to address police misconduct and should not be forced by the US Supreme Court to adopt a rule they found repugnant.

Mapp v. Ohio

In 1961, the Court was again asked to consider whether the exclusionary rule represented a right so essential to fundamental fairness that it should be mandated in all state courts. The case was Mapp v. Ohio . By this time, the Court had become concerned about the disparities among criminal trial outcomes caused by the uneven application of the exclusionary rule. In similar cases with similar evidence, criminal defendants in areas where the exclusionary rule was applied were more likely to be acquitted, while defendants in jurisdictions without the rule were more likely to be found guilty. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court reversed its earlier decision in Wolf and concluded that exclusion of unlawfully obtained evidence was a right that all defendants should possess, whether they were tried in a federal or state court. Thus, the exclusionary rule became mandatory in all state courts. This decision significantly expanded the application and reach of the rule and served to increase the controversy surrounding its implementation.

In the years following the Mapp case, legal scholars posed persuasive arguments defending and criticizing the effects of the exclusionary rule. The purpose of the rule, as stated by the Court, was to deter police misconduct. The operative effect of the rule, however, was to permit some guilty defendants to go free. Those supporting the rule argued that the rule does what it was intended to do: deter police misconduct. This was substantiated by the fact that prior to the Mapp case, in states without an exclusionary rule, police officers rarely obtained a search warrant before conducting a search. In those cases, even if the court ruled that the evidence had been obtained illegally, there were simply no consequences for this behavior, and the evidence was admitted against the defendant. After Mapp, however, it became routine police procedure in all states to obtain search warrants whenever possible before conducting a search. Failure to do so could easily result in the exclusion at trial of the unlawfully obtained evidence and the subsequent acquittal of the defendant.

Proponents further argued that the exclusionary rule gave vitality to the protections promised to all citizens in the Bill of Rights. With the rule, there are protections for an aggrieved citizen and consequences for the misbehaving officer. The rule thereby not only deters police misconduct but also serves to protect civil liberties.

Opponents argued forcefully that the exclusionary rule results in the withdrawing of valuable evidence. If judges and juries are charged with the task of determining the truth, the exclusion of evidence that is both relevant and reliable is likely to result in a miscarriage of justice: An otherwise guilty defendant would go free because of a technicality. Others argue that the rule does not effectively deter police misconduct and may actually encourage it. These critics point to instances where officers may fabricate reasons for a stop or a search, simply to avoid the sometimes egregious effects of an unbendable exclusionary rule. Otherwise respectable officers may even lie on the witness stand if they feel that dangerous defendants would otherwise go free. An additional criticism of the rule is that US laws and their interpretations have become so complex that even police officers trying their very best cannot possibly be expected to know and follow them all the time. The exclusionary rule, under those circumstances, is applied even when there is really no police misconduct to deter.

Later Supreme Court Rulings

These criticisms resulted in three 1984 US Supreme Court decisions that modified the rule. In Segura & Colon v. United States , the Court adopted the “independent source” exception to the exclusionary rule. This exception states that if the police come by the same evidence in two ways, one legal and the other illegal, the evidence will be admissible even though there has been some police misconduct. That is, as long as the police come by the evidence in at least one legal way, the fact that there has been some police misconduct will not cause the evidence to be excluded.

In the case of Nix v. Williams , the “inevitable discovery” exception to the exclusionary rule was delineated. The US Supreme Court held that evidence that would have inevitably been found by the police would be admitted in court. The Court reasoned that the purpose of the exclusionary rule was to put the police in the same position they would have been in had they not engaged in any misconduct—not to withhold from them evidence they would have found lawfully in a matter of time.

The most widely applied exception to the exclusionary rule, the “good faith doctrine,” was created in two US Supreme Court cases handed down on the same day. Those cases are United States v. Leon and Massachusetts v. Sheppard . In both of those cases, the Court found that when police have first obtained a judicially approved search warrant, and executed the warrant in accordance with the law, the evidence seized will be admitted, even if there were infirmities in the warrant. This exception recognized the fact that police are entitled to rely on determinations made by a judge as to the sufficiency and lawfulness of a search warrant. If the judge who approved the warrant was in error, the police should not be punished by excluding the evidence seized pursuant to the warrant. Essentially, the fault lies with the judge, and there is no police misconduct to deter.

By the twenty-first century, the exclusionary rule was widely accepted among law-enforcement officers and constitutional scholars. While the rule occasionally permits a criminal to go free, there is general agreement that the benefits of the rule greatly outweigh its weaknesses. Police have become more professional in their investigations and prosecutions, and individual rights have been given much stronger protections.

Bibliography

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